Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (1985)

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Whatever exists, he [the judge] said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Cormac McCarthy
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge

Cormac McCarthy
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

Cormac McCarthy
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Cormac McCarthy
The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.

Cormac McCarthy
The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

Cormac McCarthy
Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

Cormac McCarthy
... he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms.

Cormac McCarthy
... ingratitude is more common than you might think.

Cormac McCarthy
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

Cormac McCarthy
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

Cormac McCarthy
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.

Cormac McCarthy
Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

Cormac McCarthy
How many is there, John?.
Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?

Cormac McCarthy
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.

Cormac McCarthy
You can't be all Mexican. It's like being all mongrel.

Cormac McCarthy
This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?

Cormac McCarthy
For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

Cormac McCarthy
What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

Cormac McCarthy
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Cormac McCarthy
He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

Cormac McCarthy
... words were said that could not be put right again...

Cormac McCarthy
Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
People say that the coyote is a witch. Often the witch is a coyote.

Cormac McCarthy